This self-portrait of the iconic Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941) represents more than a life. For this book in two volumes, Amrita's extant letters and writings are translated and reproduced from the originals, and in their entirety. The book draws on the primary text of these letters to open up a visual narrative around the artist's oeuvre, complemented by a parallel text of notes that not only annotate but also entangle the personal in the web of contemporaneity. The editorial intervention expands the setting to include the artist's voice, photo- graphs from the Sher-Gil family album, a collation of reviews from contemporary art critics, and excerpts from autobiographies and testimonies that touched Amrita's life. There are full-colour reproductions of 147 paintings by the artist, representing the largest such collection in print, as well as of her early sketches and watercolours. This archival effort makes for a definitive volume on the life, art and writings of Amrita Sher-Gil.
The book has a Foreword by Salman Rushdie; a Prologue and an Epilogue by Vivan Sundaram; a complete list of Amrita Sher-Gil's 172 known oil paintings with thumbnail sketches and detailed captions; and a select bibliography of writings by and on Amrita Sher-Gil.
to the mid 1990s, when I began t to think about my novel The Moor's Last Sigh, I soon realized that it would contain an account of the character (and also the work) of an entirely imaginary Twentieth-century Indian woman painter. I thought about my friendships and acquaintanceships with a number of fine contemporary artists - Krishen Khanna, Bhupen Khakhar, Gulammohammed Sheikh Nilima Sheikh, Nalini Malani, Vivan Sundaram, Anish Kapoor - and of others I did not know personal but whose work I admired-Pushpamala, Navjot, Sudhir Patwardhan, Gieve Patel, Dhruva Mistry, Arpana Caur, Lasma Goud, Ganesh Pyne. The work of all these painters helped me think about the pictures my fictional Aurora Zogoiby might create. But the figure that, so to speak, gave me permission to imagine her personality, to invent a woman painter at the very heart of modern art in India-to believe in the possibility of such a woman was an artist I never met, who died tragically young, and whom I first encountered in a luminous painting by Vivan Sundaram, her nephew. That artist was Amrita Sher-Gil The painting is of a family at home. A male figure stands brooding in the background, a Western woman sits stiffly on a chair (and there is a pistol on a table at her side). The room is rich in furnishine and art, and the whole is portrayed in a palette of glowing oranges and golds. But for all the lushness. and mystery of the scene, the eye is drawn to the young woman in the foreground, strikingly beautify faintly smiling: an intelligent, amused face. This is Amrita.
I did not know much about her in those days. I knew she was half-Hungarian, and I had seen some of her paintings of scenes of village life, story-tellers, young girls - both in the National Gallery in Delhi and at Vivan's home. And while I was writing my book I resisted knowing more. I conjured up an imaginary Amrita for myself - a woman much influenced by Gandhian ideas who dedicated here to painting the 'true' life of India, the life of the villages and decided that my Aurora would be in many ways her antithesis, an unrepentant urbanite and sophisticate. It was only after the book was done that I permitted myself to know the real Amrita a little better, and I discovered at once that she and my Aurora had much more in common than I suspected. Indeed, in some ways - her sexual proclivities, for example - Amrita Sher-Gil was a more bohemian, less inhibited figure than the flamboyant woman I had made up.
This book is the result of a collaborative project over several decades. I hope my naming the many persons who have contributed to this venture at various stages and in a variety of ways will serve as acknowledgement of my indebtedness to them.
In 19721 edited a special issue on Amrita Sher-Gil for the journal Marg, from which emerged a book that included a small selection of Amrita's letters. The translations of the Hungarian letters for the book were done by Mrs Peter Koss, wife of the Hungarian Ambassador in India then she also helped with the Hungarian references. In the early 1990s, Ritu Menon and Urvashi Butalia of Kali for Women proposed to publish a larger selection of Amrita's letters. Rasna Bhushan worked on this for a considerable period of time. The basic format of the present book took shape at that time. When Indira Chandrasekhar, with whom I had worked for many years on the Journal of Arts & Ideas, set up Tulika Books in the mid-1990s, I decided to do the book with her. The scope of the book wat enlarged as she felt that it should be a collection of all the letters and writings of Amrita Sher-Gil
Mrs Shobha Nehru (Aunty Fori to me), born in 1908 and a close friend of both Amrita's mother Marie Antoinette and her sister (my mother) Indira, translated the remaining Hungarian letters. Margit Köves honed the translations and, further, provided most of the information for the Hungarian literary, social and historical references-I am especially thankful to her. I thank Johanna Balchand- ani for transcribing the Hungarian letters. Thanks also to Imre Lázár, who re-checked and added to the translations, and corrected some of the inconsistencies, Katalin Keserű, who presented the first solo exhibition of Amrita's paintings abroad as Director of Ernst Museum, Budapest, provided a great deal of the information and images relating to Hungarian artists in this book. In 1995, as Director, Mücsarnok, Dorottya Gallery, she also offered me an exhibition which resulted in my making The Sher-Gil Archive, subsequently I showed my photograph-series, Re-take of Amrita, at Ernst Museum.
Kumar Shahani has been a primary source of inspiration from as early as the mid-1980s, as part of his project to make a feature film on Amrita. A large part of the material in this book on Amrita's Paris years comes from my being a member of the research team for that film. Also part of the team was Martine Armand, as French interpreter, whose independent interviews feature in this book, Judith Ferlicchi helped me locate material on Amrita's colleagues in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, as well as checked the spellings and usage of French words in the book.
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